How Disney World is keeping tabs on visitors with rubbery wristbands

Beginning last year, Disney World started issuing „MagicBands,“ rubberized RFID wristbands that can do everything from unlock your hotel room to act as a fast pass to get you slotted to skip the long lines on rides. It also tracks your every move and lets you buy things. With tens of thousands of visitors to the park every day, Disney is amassing a wealth of personal information on its customers. „MagicBands offer a kind of data tourism, an uncanny experience of a future in which we don’t just tolerate surveillance but openly embrace it as fashion,“ Ian Bogost says in his article on the technology. Read the full piece, and see what the inside of a MagicBand looks like, on Medium.

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NFL players will wear RFID chips this season to track their movements

This year’s football season is set to begin in September, and for the first time 17 National Football League stadiums will employ radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to better track how players move on the field during games. The league has partnered with Zebra Technologies to use its quarter-sized RFID sensors inside the shoulder pads of players. These sensors will track not just where players are on the field, but also how fast they get going, and what their acceleration was like on the way there — all in real-time.

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This is what Instagram for Android would look like with Google’s Material Design

Google’s „Material“ redesign isn’t expected until later this year, but it’s already getting people excited. The new user interface style is supposed to be based around how physical objects move and is „grounded in tactile reality, inspired by our study of paper and ink.“ Google is already encouraging third-party developers to redesign their apps to fit with the new style, but some people just can’t wait for that to happen. Designer Emmanuel Pacamalan has created a concept video showing Instagram rebuilt using Material Design principles, and the results are gorgeous.

Instagram has traditionally been very slow to add visual features, but did a big redesign for iOS 7, so it would make sense that we could see a new look for the upcoming…

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Watch Deadmau5 and Toronto mayor Rob Ford get coffee in a Nyan Cat Ferrari

Electronic dance music artist Deadmau5 created an internet stir with his meme-tastic Nyan Cat Ferrari at the Gumball 3000 earlier this summer, but after the race is done, what do you do with a souped-up cat-powered hyper-car? Why, take Toronto mayor Rob Ford on a coffee run, of course. It’s hard to know what to expect when you get a rock star DJ and a disgraced mayor together, but the result is oddly sedate. They mostly talk about traffic, coffee, and being in the Ferrari itself.  Still, the video is worth watching to see Rob Ford, recently out of rehab for an addiction to crack cocaine, order a quintuple espresso.

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